Application of Analytics in Business

Analytics is in the process of transitioning from being niche and only used by few companies & their business functions to mainstream now. The penetration of it is so wide since its application can be made useful across all the business groups of the organization.

It paved the way to new roles in the companies such as Data Analyst, Data Scientist. You need not get surprised if there’s a role such as CAO – Chief Analytics Offer in any company 🙂

I was researching few weeks ago and found that its application is proliferated & penetrated across all major domains.

1) Sales

Measuring Sales force effectiveness is key to forecast how many products could be sold by a company in a given period of time. Forecasting sales data in a certain region at the sales folks level is essential to ensure if the company could meet the target assigned to that particular geography. KPI metrics will be an useful aide during this process.

A simple time series forecasting might throw the pattern based on historical data. Using this, you can adjust or transition the sales folks between different product lines or regions to achieve the targets within certain time-frame. For example, if your focus is on acquiring more B2B merchants, you can deploy more sales people in B2B sales team rather than B2C.

2) Marketing

Its sole existence is to understand the customers’ behaviors and offer the customized services ahead of your competitors.

In this space, I can think of at least 3 companies which have offered me unmatched and personalized services. a) Amazon for recommending me the best product based on my previous purchase orders and browsing history. Until now, I’ve not discovered any other service which can recommend me best books as Amazon’s recommendation engine does! b) Uber for customized coupons and reengaging me to its business as I’m mostly using Ola of late (I feel perhaps it’s because of availability of cabs), c) Dominios Pizza for attractive coupons based on my history of buying with them using mobile app.

Life Time Value (LTV) of the customer is a key metric for these companies and they would maximize their product offerings to improve its value.

3) Operations

Supply Chain analytics is a specialized area of focus especially for e-commerce companies.

Just think of it this way – you ordered a book of worth 150 bucks and you’re not there to pick the order when the delivery is attempted. The logistics company tries for 3 days and the company would be investing in arranging the delivery for 3 times in 3 days. This cost is not sustainable and ROI is negligible or sometimes even go negative for them! Based on these data, “reverse logistics” was introduced by DTDC which means the logistic company ties up with your nearby mom & pop store such that you can pick up the order at your convenience.

4) HR

Of course, employees are the biggest assets of any organization! I can’t agree more on this!!

There are analytical models which can understand the factors influencing the employees to leave, predict which employee to leave, predict which employee is more suitable for a given position or fit mapping, reengaging employees with training and fun programs, thereafter measuring the ROI of it.

5) Finance

Risk and fraud prevention is crucial for individuals and corporations. The financial institutions, be it a bank or a credit card company for instance, employed techniques that can alert and flag the unusual transactions in real-time.

Hope this article gave you a heads-up on how the use of analytics in major business functions is taking place.